This article contains instructions on how to convert a Blogger Blog into a WordPress Blog. It assumes that you have a Blogger account that uses Gmail, and that you already have WordPress fully installed on your own domain. It also assumes that you know how to use a .htaccess file accomplish page to page redirection. (If this sounds like gibberish and you would like me to do the conversion for you, please contact me.)

Why consider converting? You know all that wonderful content you’re writting on Blogger? If you have a blogger subdomain (ie. yourname.blogspot.com), and you have your own website, that content is not benefiting your website one bit!

Moving to WordPress that’s fully integrated with your website is a great way to get credit for that content, because the content lives on YOUR domain, not Blogspot. While Blogger does have a FTP publishing capability, in my experience it’s super slow for large blogs, and WordPress is a much more effective solution - easier to customize and jam packed with plugins that make it easy to super-charge your blog.

1. Verify. Login to your Blogger account and double check that it used Gmail. (Older accounts that don’t use Gmail, ie, aren’t Google related, won’t work with this tutorial.)

2. Import. Inside WordPress Admin -> Manage -> Import
Follow the steps for Blogger approval to communicate with WordPress and username choice. Complete the importing process…and marvel at how easy it was. All of your Blogger posts are now inside WordPress.

3. Permalink Matching. Inside WordPress Admin -> Options -> Permalinks
Set WordPress’s custom permalinks to match Blogger’s formatting:
ex: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html
Note the addition of .html at the end. Your goal is to set WordPress permalinks to match the permalink syntax of your Blogger blog.

4. Change Blogger Publishing. Inside Blogger: Settings -> Publishing
Switch to “Custom Domain” and point to your own registered domain where you’ve installed WordPress. If you’ve installed WordPress in a subdirectory (like I usually do) you’ll notice it won’t let you put in a subdirectory path, don’t worry, we’ll address this later.

5. Verify Redirects. Go to Google.com and enter “site:YourOldBlog.blogspot.com” replacing “YourOldBlog.blogspot.com” with the exact URL of your Blogger blog. There are no spaces at all. This will show you all of the indexed pages (in Google) of your blog. This will be useful, because you’re going to click on every one, one at a time, to verify your indexed Blogger articles correctly redirect to your WordPress articles. Yes, I know this is tedious, but it’s important.

6. Adust .htaccess file. You may need to add a .htaccess file to help the redirection from Blogger to WordPress. If you’ve installed WordPress into a directory (not in the root of your website), then you will need to include statements like this:

redirect 301 /2006/ http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/2006

This statement will redirect all posts from 2006 into the correct subdirectory “blog/2006″.

Similarly, you may need to create a redirect for archives:

redirect 301 /2006_01_01_archive.html http://yourdomain.com/blog/2006/01

Again, it’s important to click on every single indexed link (in step 5) and adjust your .htaccess file if needed to make sure all the redirects work correctly.

This tutorial has been derived from several others I’ve found on the web and modified to include specific .htaccess help. If you find it useful, please leave me a comment.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 10:26 am and is filed under the Blogs, WordPress category. Read other Aldebaran Website Design Blog articles by returning to main blog page. Need a blog added to your website? Click here to read about blog installation services or click here to contact Aldebaran Web Design.